The 2025 Genesis GV80 Coupe Looks Good and That’s All That Matters

The 2025 Genesis GV80 Coupe is all about looking the part, like wearing your matching Lululemon set to grab a milkshake or buying a vintage motorsports jacket with no intention of attending a race.

Genesis created an SUV that has the promise of a “sporty” car without the sacrifices it takes to get there: the low ground clearance, uncomfortable seats, cramped cabin, or heaven forbid, the sweat. But there’s an appeal to looking sporty without fully playing the part.

The Genesis GV80 Coupe is new for the 2025 model year, a derivative of the existing GV80 SUV. It follows the trend of taking a normal SUV, chopping its roofline diagonally to create a “fastback” profile, and calling it a coupe, despite having four doors.

But for as much as car enthusiasts like myself love to criticize SUV-coupes as “not coupes” (true), I actually like the GV80 Coupe. This is partially because I love Genesis’s current design language. Genesis is different from other luxury brands, but not so different that it screams when you see it.

The GV80 Coupe’s sloped roofline looks more agile than stately—the exact kind of SUV I’d expect a successful young adult to go for. Genesis wants people to see its sloped-roofline SUV as sporty, and non-car people certainly do. It has big, 20- to 22-inch wheels, bright-orange stitching options, and piped-in engine sound for added ambiance.

The Coupe has 375 horsepower in the base model and 409 horsepower in the top trim I tested. Instead of the GV80 SUV’s 300-horsepower, four-cylinder base engine, the Coupe gets a twin-turbocharged V-6 as standard. All-wheel drive is also standard.

But individualism comes at a price. While the 2025 GV80 SUV starts at $59,050 (with destination) and $75,150 for the 375-hp engine, the Coupe’s base price is $81,300—about $6,000 more for the same power output. Anecdotally, though, the price jump makes sense.

The GV80 Coupe has more vivid interior colors than its SUV counterpart. I drove the 409-hp Coupe with Genesis’s Ultramarine Blue interior and its bright-orange stitching. My first thought was: “If I squint, this is a Bentley.” I’ve driven this exact combination—dark blue with red stitching and a quilted-diamond pattern on the seats, plus the winged logo—in a $400,000 Bentley Continental. (Genesis’s design boss did come from Bentley, after all.)

But the GV80 Coupe is about more than its looks; It’s about driving feel, too. The Coupe has four drive modes on all vehicles: Eco, Comfort, Sport, and Custom. The 409-hp Coupe gets an additional Sport+ mode, which raises the car’s idle and provides sportier shifts, steering feel, and electronic stability control.

The GV80 is powerful but not jarringly so. The car weighs 5,000 pounds, so 409 horsepower gives it oomph without making your stomach drop. Throttle response is laid-back in comfort mode, quicker in Sport, and far more whippy in Sport+. Genesis uses augmented engine sounds in the cabin to make the car seem more intense than it is, and to me, piped-in noise in an SUV never hurt anybody. Even when you know it’s fake, it makes driving the car more fun.

There’s a long, 27.0-inch screen that runs from the driver’s instrument cluster to the infotainment system in the GV80 Coupe, and when you use a turn signal, part of the instrument cluster turns into a blind-spot camera—a feature commonly seen in other Kia and Hyundai products. In Sport+ mode, the needle on the digital speedometer turns into a red glow stick with animated sparks raining down, like a digital Fourth of July sparkler in your car.

The GV80 Coupe’s brakes respond well, and the gas pedal is weighty, which is a good thing. A light-as-a-feather accelerator pedal makes you feel disconnected from the car, and having pedal tension reminds you that you have a large vehicle at your feet. In an era when sound deadening makes 70 mph feel like 40, it’s important to remember that you’re driving a 5,000-pound SUV at high speeds.

There’s not a lot of road noise in the Coupe, and with no audio on, there’s the tiniest bit of wind noise at highway speeds. But the whole car is big and fancy and luxurious. When a friend asked me what I thought of the Coupe, I said: “It’s just really good.”

I drove and rode in the GV80 Coupe for about five hours total, and had only a few nitpicks. The first is that wireless Apple CarPlay is not yet available—it’s wired only, for now—but Genesis says an over-the-air update will eventually give the cars that capability. The next was that while the seat has automatic posture adjustments, my back still hurt after a few hours at the wheel. I asked a friend who also drove the car if they felt that way too, and they did.

The last complaint is silly, but Genesis talked up the fact that the GV80 Coupe has exposed tailpipes versus the SUV’s hidden ones (sporty versus cushy, remember). The Coupe has quad exhaust tips on the back, and mine were trapezoidal shapes lined in chrome.

But when I squatted down to look at them, the chrome trapezoids were just pieces of the rear bumper that didn’t connect to the tube-shaped exhaust tips behind them. It was like looking at a children’s “match the shapes.” I don’t expect exhaust tips to be perfect chrome trapezoids, but I do expect the actual tips to be hidden a little better.

Overall, the GV80 Coupe does what Genesis wants it to do: appeals to a younger, more-fun buyer who wants to pair the practicality and stature of a luxury SUV with the sportiness of bright-orange stitching and a sloped roofline. It’s for the people who want to put on their fancy workout clothes to run errands. Sometimes, that’s all of us.

That’s why the GV80 works. Because even the biggest of purists—those of us who think you have to put in the work and be uncomfortable to drive a true sports car—can’t argue the appeal of a big, cushy SUV with heated armrests and a sloped roofline.

After all, it’s nice to be pampered.